Case 6-Afr-Gabon-Fang-Reliquary Head-Wood-19th c

Gabon-Fang-Reliquary Head-Wood-19th c

Wood, metal, H. 13 in. (34.9 cm.)

19th century

Fang reliquary heads are the archaic form of the full figures (Tessman (1913: II, 117). These heads were thrust down into bark reliquary barrels and took, as it were, the bark barrel as a body. The power of the heads was shared, by association, with the power of the skulls which reposed beneath them. Later, the heads evolved into full figures that sat atop the reliquary. Subsequently, under colonial pressures, the reliquaries and the skulls they contained were abandoned, leaving the figures themselves as the only repositories of ancestral power. For several hundred years before the stabilization of the colonial period, the Fang, originally a savanna people, migrated into and throughout the equatorial forest. While a migratory style of life prohibited the use of the earth-anchored ancestral shrines so common in the savanna of West Africa, the bark reliquaries of skulls were perfectly transportable shrines. Heads like this one were also very transportable— much more so than the later full figures. This head, then, may well have been carved somewhere in Cameroon and transported, after several removes of migratory villages, into Gabon, where it was collected. One remarks the relentless gaze, particularly of heads that, like this one, employed brass eye disks. These heads were intended to sit in dark corners of the men’s sleeping quarters in vigilant protection of the reliquaries from the uninitiated mainly women and children. This was the case even though the skulls of especially powerful women might be kept in the reliquary, and even though the reliquary figure itself might be female, as is the case here. Since both the figures and the reliquary were black, they could hardly be made out in their corner. But the flash of the brass eye disks, they were often kept polished—was sufficient to drive away intruders.

Offerings of food were periodically set before the reliquary, which is to say before the ancestors. At such times, the reliquary head was cleansed with palm- or other tree oil, giving it its characteristic luster. Such cleansing restored the figure’s power of intercession with the skulls in the reliquary and, by

extension, with the ancestors, for the Fang talked to the head, and not to the skulls themselves. It is appropriate that the word “power” has recurred in my comments, for Fang art is elemental yet immensely powerful.

james Fernandez

Published: Jerusalem 1967, no. 146 (ill.); Sieber and Rubin 1968, no.

104 (ill.).

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